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“If you’re concerned about it, maybe there’s a reason we should be flying over you, right?” That’s the callous response of one drone trade group representative when asked his opinion of those who worry about the increasing use of the unmanned aerial vehicles and the corresponding decrease in privacy and civil liberties. The man who spoke those words is Douglas McDonald, the director of special operations for Unmanned Applications Institute International and president of a North Dakota chapter of an unmanned vehicle trade group. Another North Dakotan has a different take on the use of drones in the Flickertail State.

It’s been about a year since a North Dakota man was arrested after a local SWAT team tracked him down using a Predator drone it borrowed from the Department of Homeland Security. Although the story has not been widely reported, Rodney Brossart became one of the first (if not the first) American citizens arrested by local law enforcement with the use of a federally-owned drone surveillance vehicle after holding the police at bay for over 16 hours.

Brossart’s run-in with law enforcement began after six cows found their way onto his property (about 3,000 acres near Lakota, North Dakota) and he refused to turn them over to officers. In fact, according to several sources, Brossart and a few family members ran police off his farm at the point of a gun. Naturally, police weren’t pleased with Brossart’s brand of hospitality, so they returned with a warrant, a SWAT team, and a determination to apprehend Brossart and the cows.

A standoff ensued and the Grand Forks police SWAT team made a call to a local Air Force base where they knew a Predator drone was deployed by the DHS. About three years before the Brossart incident, the police department had signed an agreement with DHS for the use of the drone. No sooner did the call come in than the drone was airborne and Brossart’s precise location was pinpointed with laser-guided accuracy. The machine-gun toting SWAT officer rushed in, tased then arrested Brossart on various charges including terrorizing a sheriff, and the rest is history. Literally.

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There are times it is particularly difficult to find a starting point as far as discussing the Constitution is concerned in New Jersey. There is, despite an occasional minor victory, a lack of desire in both the Democratic State Legislature and the Republican Governor’s administration, to address issues blatantly spelled out in the Constitution, it is impossible to fathom how anyone can see things any other way sometimes. “…the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” is one of those. Those of us who believe strongly in the Tenth Amendment generally take the Second pretty seriously too, even people like me who do not own a gun (as opposed to citizens who do).

Just a short two days after the Aurora, Colorado shooting that left twelve dead and nearly five times that many wounded, New Jersey Honorable Senator Frank Lautenberg rushed to his desk with a speed of a man one quarter his age and blew the dust off his old bill from last year to ban so-called “assault weapons” at the federal level. Our Junior Senator, Bob Menendez, was all to eager to echo the call to ignore the Second Amendment. Guys, I know tyranny gets impatient at times, but couldn’t you have at least waited until the bodies were laid to rest first?

According to the Star-Ledger, James Holmes used a handgun, shotgun and an assault weapon with a high capacity magazine. The article, which originally failed to differentiate whether the “assault weapon” was a fully automatic, which is already illegal except for almost exclusively military and law enforcement use, or a semiautomatic lookalike. To their credit, they appear to have edited the article and specified the rifle was a semiautomatic military style weapon. For those who don’t know exactly what I mean and why there is a HUGE difference, please observe the following demonstration.

One area where the emotion gets in the way of the facts is the idea that banning certain guns will somehow result in safer streets and prevent incidents like this from happening, as if psychopaths, terrorists, gangsters or government ag…ahem…other violent types will somehow respect gun control laws. Even if gun control laws somehow kept Mr. Holmes from sneaking guns into the gun-free movie theater, he was likely smart enough, and somehow well equipped enough, to figure out several other ways to kill people, based on reports describing his apartment.